Woops. This is unfinished. Check back later.
The Menagerie, Part 2 (a),
or,
Dimensions of Perspective Revisited,
by Liviana (Giovanna Laine)
There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio,
Than are dreamt of in your philosophy.
~ William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, Act I, Scene 5
(continued from previous post)
MORE (AND BEYOND)
We now have a total of nineteen different dimensions which contribute to a person's perspective (or worldview). However, this collection of nineteen dimensions of perspective is hardly a complete picture. We can expand these 19 dimensions fairly easily to 163 using another Platonic solid, the pentagonal dodecahedron, which has 160 diagonals (100 space diagonals and 60 face diagonals), to which can be added the ordinary Euclidean 3 dimensions, and adding the 30 edges would yield 193 dimensions of perspective:
I will begin, however, by expanding to only 33 dimensions of perspective using the Euclidean three dimensions and the thirty edges of the pentagonal dodecahedron (in other words, I will only offer "more" and not go on to "beyond," at this time). I will not be labeling the 20 vertices of the pentagonal dodecahedron as I did the 8 vertices of the cube above (each vertex was labeled with a letter from A to H inclusive), because by now, the reader should understand how I am doing this. Each of the edges of this Platonic solid, just like those of the cube, terminate at two of the vertices.
The pentagonal dodecahedron has twelve faces, twenty vertices, thirty edges, and one-hundred-and-sixty diagonals. The twelve edges of the cube each terminate in two of the eight vertices. The thirty edges of the pentagonal dodecahedron also each terminate at two of the twenty vertices. While labeling each vertex may help the reader to visualize where the edges are in three dimensions, the reader may also simply count the lines in the image above and choose any of them for any of the 33 dimensions I will be here enumerating, adding in the three dimensions themselves to get the final three of the 33.
Of these, I have already presented 19, which means I will only be adding 14 more. The list is as follows:
- Politics (Statism vs Anti-Statism)
- Economics
- Civil Liberties and Civil Rights
- Politics (Centralization vs Decentralization)
- Imperialism vs Non-Interventionism
- Social Attitudes
- Cultural Attitudes
- Epistemology
- Globalism vs Localism
- Aesthetics
- Ecology vs Exploitation
- Idealism vs Pessimism
- Ontology and Metaphysics
- Diversity vs Uniformity/Conformity
- Ethics
- Romance and Sexuality
- Politics (Democracy vs Autocracy)
- Religion and Sacred Tradition
- Mysticism
- Compassion vs Selfishness (related to Ethics)
- 21 Introversion vs Extroversion
- 22 Dionysianism vs Apollonianism (and Passion vs Ratiocination)
- 23 Self-Affirmation vs Self-Abnegation
- 24 Conceit vs Humiliation
- 25 Perception vs Judgement
- Sensation vs Intuition (related to Epistemology)
- 27 Bellicosity vs Pacifism
- 28 Dominance vs Submission
- Identity
- Cooperation vs Competition
- 31 Geography/Environment
- 32 Education vs Ignorance
- Time
I will here discuss those numbered from 20 to 33:
20. Compassion vs Selfishness
Compassion vs Selfishness is related to Ethics and Economics. In the introduction to what remains perhaps her most notorious work, The Virtue of Selfishness, Ayn Rand wrote:
In popular usage, the word “selfishness” is a synonym of evil; the image it conjures is of a murderous brute who tramples over piles of corpses to achieve his own ends, who cares for no living being and pursues nothing but the gratification of the mindless whims of any immediate moment.
Yet the exact meaning and dictionary definition of the word “selfishness” is: concern with one’s own interests.
This concept does not include a moral evaluation; it does not tell us whether concern with one’s own interests is good or evil; nor does it tell us what constitutes man’s actual interests. It is the task of ethics to answer such questions.
I am not certain from what dictionary Rand got this alleged definition. The English Dictionary of the Oxford Living Dictionaries defines "selfish" as:
(of a person, action, or motive) lacking consideration for other people; concerned chiefly with one's own personal profit or pleasure.
The Oxford Living Dictionaries are, as one might expect from the title, descriptive lexica; that is, their definitions are based on contemporary ("living") usages, rather than prescriptions of how words should be used (as would be the case in a prescriptive lexicon). To put this another way, a descriptive lexicographer would offer definitions based on contemporary understandings of words, while a prescriptive lexicographer would offer definitions which might reflect older understandings of the same words; the descriptive lexicographer tells how people do use words, and a prescriptive lexicographer tells how people ought to use words.
That having been said, I find the notion that "selfishness" was defined without any "moral evaluation" in 1961 to be dubious. I wasn't alive at the time, but I did enter this world only a few years later, and I cannot recall anyone of my acquaintance having ever thought of "selfishness" as anything other than unethical, or at least immature.
Rand's argument (if it can be called that), however, rests not upon a dictionary definition, and is less a defense of "selfishness" in the ordinary sense in which we use it today than it is a condemnation of the concept of "sacrifice." While I am no fan of "sacrifice," preferring instead the concept of "offering," I am not certain she properly understood the term "sacrifice," although she contended that "selfishness" as we know it is sacrifice of others to oneself, and "unselfishness" is sacrificing our own interests to others, and rejects both forms of what she regards as "sacrifice." I contend that benevolence or altruism does not necessarily require self-sacrifice at all, but I'll come back to this shortly. First let me address the concept of "sacrifice."
The English word "sacrifice" derives from two Latin words "sacra" + "facere." The literal meaning of "sacra facere" is "to make sacred, to set apart for consecration/dedication." The underlying concept of the word to the people of Latium was one of propitiation, that there was some divinity who was angry with the people, or who might become so, and thus had to be appeased in order to avert his or her wrath.
By contrast, the Celts of Gallia had a word "adbertâ," which literally meant "to bring, carry, bear to or toward." The Proto-Celtic root of this word survived into Old Irish as "idbart" (Modern Irish before the orthographic revision had it as "íodhbuirt," more recently as "íobairt," and Gaelic has "iobairt") and into modern Welsh as "aberth." The Arch Druid Crommán mac Nessa argued that the worldviews reflected by these two conceptions are incompatible, that the Celts gave offerings as a manifestation of a survival among the Celtic peoples of the Proto-Indo-European conception of "reciprocal gift-giving," while the Italic peoples gave sacrifices out of fear; mac Nessa further argued that this difference in outlook arose after the Italo-Celtic split, and the migration of the Italic peoples into what is now Italy, where the environment included dangers like earthquakes and volcanic eruptions.
Rand went on to attack a straw man effigy of Altruism, insisting that the concept dictates that "any action taken for one’s own benefit is evil." She further focused on Altruism as an ethic in itself, taken outside the context of any broader ethic in which it exists, as if it were its own self-contained system, a portrayal which is, to put it mildly, an unrealistic caricature. While it is certainly true that the literal meaning of "Altruism" refers to "others" (from French "autrui" ["altrui" in Old French], meaning "of or to others," from Latin "alteri," the dative singular form of "alter," meaning "other"), I am unaware of any inherent concept of self-abnegation in the word. Indeed, only in Zoology is the term defined in a manner which necessitates harm to self in order to benefit another. While the Abrahamic tradition inculcates such masochism to some extent, the practice of charity is by no means exclusive to Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, nor their relatives and offshoots (or "deviations," which is perhaps the least insulting way those who regard themselves as "orthodox" refer to such offshoots), nor even to religions which, like the Abrahamic tradition, teach a conception of self-abnegation (such as some forms of Eastern religions like Buddhism).
Indeed, the concept of charity or Altruism is inherent to the natural state of humanity in Tribe, nor is Tribalism reducible to "Collectivism" as Rand held; Tribalism is Cooperativism. While some things are indeed held in common by the Tribe as a whole, private property also exists in a Tribal economy. The central concept of Tribalism as an economic system is not Communism, but Cooperative Commonwealth, the notion that the Tribe is the basic unit of society, and that individuals in order to share in the benefits of the Tribe must also contribute to the Tribe, with the council of Elders determining by custom later codified into law where to distribute the "renders" (taxes) and where to direct the cooperative work. One who does not contribute to the Tribe, who takes without giving, is considered a "slacker," and, as Tacitus noted in Germania, persons who shirked their duties to the Tribe were one of three classes of criminal who warranted execution by being pressed into the mud of a bog under a wicker hurdle (the other two classes were cowards and the "disreputable of body," which some argue refers to "sodomites," but which mac Nessa asserted is a reference to child molesters; the original text in chapter 12 reads: ""... ignavos et imbelles et corpore infames caeno ac palude, iniecta insuper crate, mergunt. ..." which I translate as "the lazy ones, the cowardly ones, and those who are disreputable of body into the sludge of a bog, with a hurdle thrown over, they plunge"). Those who are disabled, elderly, or otherwise unable to contribute are not slackers or shirkers, but are to be provided for, as their inability is not the product of a choice to not contribute.
Rand anticipated this objection and dismissed the concept of society entirely in the first essay in her little book, claiming that "... there is no such entity as 'society,' since society is only a number of individual men." She insisted on characterizing whatever group within society (whether it be the majority or some other group) settles questions as a "gang," choosing a word which she knew was loaded with negative emotive value. She further dwelt on the concept of "values" and interpreted that in connection with an economic understanding of the term, leaving aside the more typical (in Philosophy) term "virtues," which would have been more for her to wrestle with in her posturing before her audience, getting to the word "virtue" only after having spewed ten or eleven pages of opinionated piffle focused on "value" in the sense of Economics, as "that which one works to gain and/or keep." When she did finally get around to addressing the concept of "virtue," she did so in relation to "value" as she had defined it, offering a definition of "virtue" which I cannot recall having ever seen in any philosophical work (indeed, it turns on its head the Greek conception of ἀρετή, "aretê," which is "virtue" in the sense of "what enables function," as in, "the virtue of a knife," indicating its function or purpose, that quality which enables it to fulfill its function, which would be "sharpness" for most knives). Her definition of "virtue" is: "the act by which one gains and/or keeps it [value]." The choice of the word "act" is revealing: it exposes her ethic as some manifestation of Legalism, in spite of her frequent use of the term "principle" in her work. A "principle" in Ethics is a guide, whereas a "law" in Ethics is a positive injunction to perform some (more or less specific) act or a negative prohibition to not perform some (more or less specific) act. However, immediately upon defining "virtue" in this idiosyncratic manner, she departed from it to discuss "rationality" as "man's basic virtue." Rationality is not an act, but a quality. Ratiocination is an act, namely, the act of utilizing or exercising one's rationality.
The other two "virtues" which Rand gave were "productiveness" (a thinly-veiled allusion to the Calvinistic work ethic) and "pride," which she defined as "the recognition of the fact 'that as man must produce the physical values he needs to sustain his life, so he must acquire the values of character that make his life worth sustaining—that as man is a being of self-made wealth, so he is a being of self-made soul'." This contention about "self-made wealth" (like the contention of some of her followers about "free choice") also ignored the facticity of human existence; much of any given person's current situation exists as it does because of how things have been done in the past, such that some enter the world with advantages, while others enter the world in an already disadvantaged state, due in no small measure to the inequities arising through force having been used in the past to exploit their ancestors (this is not about "race," but is instead about Capitalism, Mercantilism, Feudalism, Colonialism, and Imperialism). Corporate entities have expropriated wealth unto themselves, more often than not by means of unjust action. To stop all social contract of "give and take" without having righted those wrongs first and then insist that "my property" or "my self-made wealth" is justification for anything one wishes to do in connection with said property is to ignore the causes of present circumstances and thereby perpetuate already extant injustice. It is a pipe-dream no less unrealistically Utopian than Marxist Socialism which imagines that a dictatorship will pave the way for a "classless society."
She also claimed that Ethics has largely become based on subjective whim in recent centuries, but in fact, this is not the case. The word "ethics" comes from Classical Greek "ethikos," which signifies "custom," and the earliest conceptions of Ethics and Law arose from social custom (she even pointed out that Aristotle "based his ethical system on observations of what the noble and wise men of his time chose to do," so she was aware of this fact, but chose to spin it into an attack upon Aristotle for neither seeking validation for these customs, nor asking why they existed). Customs do not arise from an individual's "rational free choice," as in her individualist perspective (more recently re-branded as "voluntaryist"), nor from ephemeral fads of popularity (as she alleged were the sources of an ethic based on a conception of "the good of society"), but from the habits and traditions of the society in which the individual lives. To cry about "free choice" (rational or otherwise) in such a context is to betray philosophical and social immaturity; of course in certain societies, one's freedoms and liberties are greater than in others, but even in those, one yet has duties in the form of obligations and responsibilities: one must obey the law. While this is not an absolute (there are unjust laws which should be challenged in the courts, and some societies allow voice to individuals to petition for changes to laws, and/or to select representatives who can effect such changes), it is nevertheless part of the cost of social life; society is not all "take," but is instead "give and take " If one should refuse, through "free choice," to conform to such responsibilities and obligations, then that one is also necessarily giving "free choice" to accepting the consequences of such refusal. "Libertas in legibus," is the saying, "Liberty under the laws." It is Law which ensures Liberty against the "gang" (but, to point out that which should be obvious: without Liberty, Law is mere oppression).
Rand attempted to dismiss the benefits of society as well, by asserting that "... everything man needs has to be discovered by his own mind and produced by his own effort." On the contrary, when one lives in a society, one does not discover or produce all necessary things. She even went so far as to claim that a person must learn everything himself or herself. Nothing is further from the truth; some things cannot be learned by experience or reason, but must be taught. An example of her own offering is "the laws of Logic." Logic is not, as I have already pointed out many times and in diverse places, mere common sense, but a discipline. It requires study (of someone else's work) and practice. In origin, Logic as a discipline was developed by observation, namely, by Aristotle observing the arguments of lawyers in court, which again required others. Nor is there need for every individual to reinvent the wheel; things already learned and produced do not have to be redone by each person; progress (even of a technological sort) would be impossible in such a scheme, for there would be no learning from the work of one's predecessors. She wrote: "No percepts and no 'instincts' will tell him how to light a fire, how to weave cloth, how to forge tools, how to make a wheel, how to make an airplane, how to perform an appendectomy, how to produce an electric light bulb or an electronic tube or a cyclotron or a box of matches. Yet his life depends on such knowledge—and only a volitional act of his consciousness, a process of thought, can provide it." On the contrary, "his life" depends on others. One does not acquire such knowledge as "how to perform an appendectomy" by reason alone, but by being taught by experienced surgeons. Nor would a person be able to perform such a surgery on himself or herself; it must be done by another. In all of these things, Rand ignored or intentionally glossed over the benefits of society in order to affirm the individual, and then presumed to go on to mock a straw man of the positions with which she disagreed by referring to "doctrines which tell you ... that ethics has nothing to do with reality, with existence, with one’s practical actions and concerns" after having ignored reality herself in her effort to justify her own ethic!
She later (later in the same essay, in fact, although much later, devoting less than a single page to the admission) contradicted herself on this, writing: "Man is the only species that can transmit and expand his store of knowledge from generation to generation; the knowledge potentially available to man is greater than any one man could begin to acquire in his own life-span; every man gains an incalculable benefit from the knowledge discovered by others," and admitted that a person may benefit from living in a society, but refused to admit that such benefit must go hand in hand with cost, deriding as she did the needy as "Parasites, moochers, looters, brutes and thugs ... of no value to a human being ..." Almost immediately after this passage, she discussed, briefly, political implications of her ethic, stating that its "basic political principle" is "No man may initiate the use of physical force against others," and expanded "man" to also include "group or society or government" (because here such an expansion was useful for her purpose, whereas she rejected the notion of such an expansion in other aspects of her essay, asserting instead the primacy of the individual). Then she wrote, as one with any familiarity with her disciples' dogma might expect: "The only proper, moral purpose of a government is to protect man’s rights, which means: to protect him from physical violence—to protect his right to his own life, to his own liberty, to his own property and to the pursuit of his own happiness. Without property rights, no other rights are possible." (Italics in original) I have already addressed this conceit about "property" above as being divorced from the facticity of human existence and unrealistic. Certainly private property should be a thing, but in order for an "Objectivist" paradise to be brought into existence, the playing field would have to be levelled first, and that is something to which "Objectivists" would never consent. It would make no difference, however, for their "paradise" would be as ephemeral as attempts to establish such a society have already been in Honduras and Chile; it would become a disaster just as it has in those nations.
Rand wrote (italics in original):
The basic social principle of the Objectivist ethics is that just as life is an end in itself, so every living human being is an end in himself, not the means to the ends or the welfare of others—and, therefore, that man must live for his own sake, neither sacrificing himself to others nor sacrificing others to himself. To live for his own sake means that the achievement of his own happiness is man’s highest moral purpose.
I am not certain in what sense this could be described as "social," apart from the passive admonition against "sacrificing others." As above, this also ignores the facticity of human existence and is likewise unrealistic. One can claim to be an end unto oneself, but reality does not permit such a state of existence for a Human Being, apart from some person becoming a hermit and relying on none but himself or herself, and accepting the consequences of such a choice. In that state of existence, all of one's "self-made wealth" becomes meaningless; "wealth" has value only in the context of a society, where it can be used to purchase goods and services, to pay debts, and so on. Again, what of one's children? Does one have no ethical obligation to care for them, at times "sacrificing" one's own desires for their good? Should they be birthed and then put into a trough set adrift on the currents of a river with the hope that they die in infancy or be rescued and raised by a she-wolf? Indeed, the few mentions of "child," "children," "son," or "daughter" in the entire book are largely devoid of any ethical import or imperative, or used as an Argumentum ad Misericordiam against the faux-Socialism of the Soviet Union, and the few references to "family" seem to be mostly used as examples in discussion of negative concepts. The astute reader would surely be left wondering if Ayn Rand hated children and lacked any capacity for affection. This "Objectivist Ethic" is, far from rational as Rand attempted to characterize it, utterly preposterous!
Rand further mocked more recent philosophers of Ethics as "neomystics" for having, according to her, substituted "the good of society" in place of "the will of God" as the standard for Ethics, yet she did the same thing, by asserting, through the mouthpiece of her literary creation John Galt: "It is only the concept of ‘Life’ that makes the concept of 'Value' possible." If "the will of God" and "the good of society" be not rational bases for an ethical standard, then neither is her conception of "maintenance of the organism's life." Her choice to assert that "the ultimate value ... is the organism's life" is no less subjective or arbitrary, and there can be times in which an organism will choose death over life, such as in cases of great agony, debilitating disease, imminent but slow death, and the like, or even to save another's life. She attempted to justify her position by asserting that "Metaphysically, life is the only phenomenon that is an end in itself ..." yet this is such a ridiculous assertion even on its face that it cannot be taken seriously. Life does not exist for itself; life exists for some purpose, not merely its own perpetuation, since life is finite. We who are philosophers of Ethics must find value for life, not merely in life itself. Origen said that the purpose of life is to become a person. Others might say that the purpose of life is pleasure, or happiness, or self-actualization, or the elimination of suffering, or any of a number of other goals, including the concept of social, political, and economic justice in a cooperative society in which people share and work together, with both rewards and costs. Psychologists have found that Altruism, far from being self-abnegating, can be its own reward (see, for example: Pay It Forward), that we are hard-wired for Empathy (see: Darwin's Touch: Survival of the Kindest), and that it takes more intelligence to cooperate than to be greedy (see: Greed Is Good?).
Rand rightly rejected "the premise that the happiness of one man necessitates the injury of another," but wrongly denied that "rational self-interest" as she intended it does not mean a "right to sacrifice others," turning what she called an "assumption" that it does into an example of Abusive ad Hominem in which she attacked those who see her "rational self-interest" for what it is, as ethically bankrupt and intellectually deficient, going on to claim that the "Objectivist Ethic":
holds that the rational interests of men do not clash—that there is no conflict of interests among men who do not desire the unearned, who do not make sacrifices nor accept them, who deal with one another as traders, giving value for value.
On the contrary, in her scheme, the individual owes nothing to society, but is free to benefit from society. This is not "trade" as she went on to equate with the principle of Justice, but selfishness in the ordinary understanding of the term, as an unethical or immature quality. She mocked the idea of wanting to have one's cake and eat it, too, yet this is exactly the outcome of her view: to receive all the benefit but not pay the cost.
One who expects to receive the benefits of living in a society, whether it be a Tribe, a nation-state, or even a "nuclear" family, must be willing to contribute to that society as well, or be subject to some form of punishment, even if it be "only" expulsion or exile. One must do one's part. To behave otherwise is to be guilty of parasitism, and worthy of no better appellation than that of "leech." Rand and her cohorts have loved applying the designation of "parasite" to those who advocate for or benefit from Altruism, and have insisted that parasites are not "individualists." On the contrary, "individualists" in the sense she intended (influenced, perhaps, to some extent by Herbert Hoover's anti-labor euphemism for austerity and opposition to Solidarity, "Rugged Individualism") are the worst parasites of all. Society is "give and take," not "take" alone. "Give and take" is the very essence of any society, the contract between members of the society for mutual interdependence and cooperation for the common good. Thus, in Rand's notion that a person might be virtuous and "selfish," by which she claims to mean the "values" of "self-esteem" and "rational self-interest," she overlooked the vice of non-action, insisting that a person may act in his or her own interest without harming anyone else, but she failed to take account of (indeed, she explicitly denied) the reality of society; no person is an island unaffected by others, nor can one's action or lack thereof in a society always have no effect on others. If you receive, you must also give, or go somewhere outside of society where you do not have to give, but also cannot receive. This is a simple fact; if you expect rights and privileges to be guaranteed by a society, then you must also submit to responsibilities and duties to a society. The Human Being is a social animal and does not exist in a vacuum; we form societies and agree to not only the rewards, but also the costs, of living in such societies.
There is much more to criticize in Rand's little book (and very, very little with which to agree); I could, for example, address her odd claims about reason and consciousness and focus, which reflect a very modern Western concept and devaluation of the techniques of Mystics (indeed, she explicitly condemns Mysticism in the same work, on epistemological grounds, asserting that Reason alone is the justification for belief, which ignores the very real history of Rationalism, a school of thought in Epistemology which affirms Reason, but also Intuition [explained above] and Inspiration, as justification for belief; she also condemns Mysticism as an ethic, falsely claiming, undoubtedly through limited knowledge or understanding, that Mysticism as ethic sets value "beyond the grave" and in a "supernatural dimension"), and while Mysticism has been a topic in this post, the post is not intended to be or become nothing but a critique of Ayn Rand's pseudo-philosophy. Anyway, I am far more interested in what Friedrich Nietzsche had to say on the subject of compassion than what Ayn Rand had to say about anything, although I will disagree with some of his notions as well. So much for Ayn Rand's irrational notions about Ethics. Thus, we turn to "Compassion" and Nietzsche's view thereof.
21. Introversion vs Extroversion
22. Dionysianism vs Apollonianism (and Passion vs Ratiocination)
23. Self-Affirmation vs Self-Abnegation
24. Conceit vs Humiliation
Conceit vs Humiliation is a dimension which extends from unwarranted pride (conceit or arrogance) to humiliation (which is an extremely low self esteem). In between are pride (which is to say, the virtue of warranted pride in one's achievements and the like) and humility.
25. Perception vs Judgement
26. Sensation vs Intuition
Sensation vs Intuition is related to that branch of Philosophy known as Epistemology (see above). When philosophers consider the question of what is justification for belief, those who favor Empiricism assert that "Experience" is the only justification, while those who favor Rationalism say that "Reason" is the only justification. These, however, are loaded terms. By "Experience," the Empiricist intends "Sense Perception" primarily, and, as a corollary to that, "Experimentation and Observation." By "Reason," the Rationalist intends "Deductive Logic and Mathematics" primarily, and, as a corollary to those, "Intuition and/or Inspiration." The Empiricist's focus on Sensation and "the Empirical Method" is fairly self-explanatory. The Rationalist's support of "Intuition," however, requires some elucidation. Intuition is commonly thought of as referring to some sort of instinctive or perhaps even semi-magical understanding. However, the term in reality refers to "immediate" understanding without conscious reasoning. Having a "gut feeling" or "hunch" is not some sort of "psychic" phenomenon, but rather is a subconscious grasp of something based in part on things already learned. While these two approaches have at times seemed to be irreconcilable, the Epistemological Pragmatist accepts both as justification for belief, realizing that some things can be demonstrated through the Empirical Method, but other things must be intuited or consciously reasoned; the solution of mathematical problems is always done by means of reason or intuition.
27, Bellicosity vs Pacifism
28, Dominance vs Submission
29. Identity
Identity has to do with one's sense of self. This sense may involve a number of factors, such as ethnicity, culture, gender identity, nationality, residence, voluntary association, and so on. Identity is not inherently detrimental, but, depending on other factors (other dimensions of perspective), it can be perverted into a sort of "us vs them" mentality. Both major parties in the United States use "identity politics" in various ways, which are mostly perversions of identity which either explicitly promote an "us vs them" mentality, or implicitly lead to such a divisive perspective. In the former case, the pundits and ideologues promote the idea that "I am good, and therefore those who are 'like' me are also good, so therefore, those who are 'different' from me must be 'evil' in some sense." In the latter case, a focus on Identity as "interest group" leads to various groups divided and in competition for attention to their concerns from political figures. One can, however, maintain Identity without sacrificing Solidarity with others. The oppressed should of course not abandon their cultures, their associations, and so on, but they should stand together and demand attention to ALL of their concerns from political figures. It has been rightly said, "There is strength in numbers," but when we are all divided into our separate little interest groups, we're not standing together, and our strength is diminished. This is also related to the dimension of "Cooperation vs Competition."
30. Cooperation vs Competition
Cooperation vs Competition has many intersections with other dimensions, such as the dimension of "Identity" just discussed. Another dimensional intersection is with Compassion vs Selfishness, and another, which I would like to discuss a bit at this point, is with Economics. "Free Market Capitalism" has as one of its ideals something sometimes called "Spontaneous Order," which has been expressed as "When individual rights are respected, unregulated competition will maximize economic benefit for society by providing the most goods and services possible at the lowest cost." This ideal presupposes private ownership of the means of production, with the lion's share of net profit going to the owner. While advocates of some forms of Socialism also espouse an idealization of competition, in a socialist economy at its most fundamental manifestation, the means of production are owned by those who do the work of production (a Cooperative Business). This ideal of the producers owning and controlling the means of production is shared by advocates of some forms of Tribalism as well, particularly forms which look to Brehon Law for inspiration; under Brehon Law, the Tribe owned the land on which the cattle graze, although portions were allotted to individual households by the system of Tanistry. However, in such a tribalist economy, the various households of the Tribe cooperated with one another, rather than compete. They were certainly free to compete with other Tribes, but within the Tribe, a sense of cooperation ruled the economy, such that, for example (keeping the agrarian setting, but moving the temporal factor to a modern-day setting), if I own a tractor and you have a bigger allotment of land than I, then I will come round and plough your field, and in return, you will give me some of the crop produced at the harvest. This sort of cooperation is what kept rural communities from devolving into chaos during the early years of the Great Depression. Tribalism in the modern sense, however, is not always primarily agrarian, and involves more than this basic form of cooperation, extending into Cooperative Associations and Cooperative Businesses in which, for example, a household or family might own a business and do so as a Cooperative (or "Co-op").
31. Geography/Environment
bowl
32. Education vs Ignorance
33. Time
Time in this context refers to age, longevity, and so on. Those things affect your perspective. If you live in a society where the average lifespan is only 30, you're going to look at things differently from someone in a society where the average lifespan is 85. And with age, perspectives change. What you found crucially important at age 14 is not so important to you now.
Time also refers in this context to one's temporal environment, which is to say, the age or era in which one lives. Persons who lived in the Iron Age had perspectives which those living in the Information Age might find alien, and vice-versa. In the same sense that one's spatial environment has an effect on one's outlook, so too does one's temporal environment.
BEYOND THE BEYOND
Even if we expanded to the full 193 dimensions of perspective which could be represented through the pentagonal dodecahedron, however, the picture would still be incomplete. If we wanted a complete conception of the many dimensions of perspective, we would need to tesselate Euclidean space and go with a Schlegel diagram projecting a Platonic solid into four dimensions, something like this representation of an icositetrachoron:
but even such an approach could easily fail to account for a complete picture, and ... I'm not sadistic (or masochistic), so I'll stop with the 33 dimensional representation (at least for now). The point to this is not to blow your mind, but to open it to seeing beyond the limited and limiting schemes which society promotes in the interests of perpetuating the status quo. As noted in the quote from Shakespeare at the beginning of this discussion, reality is bigger than our biggest conceptions, and Socrates said "The unexamined life is not worth living." Love wisdom and seek the truth, my friend, dream and analyze, make your way into the light and find the lost word. I can only offer an imperfect map, but perhaps it will be of some help (and remember when emerging into the light for the first time to temper your experience by moving quickly into a penumbral light, to give your perception time to adjust).
If you would like to explore Geometry further, and apply its concepts to Worldview as I have done, this video may offer some keys:
The title of the post comes from Star Trek (The Original Series), Season 1, episode 12; episode 12 overall; production code 16.
Fair use notice
This blog contains copyrighted material the use of which may not been specifically authorized by the copyright owner. I am making such material available in my effort to advance understanding of scientific, environmental, political, human rights, economic, philosophical, psychological, cultural, and social issues, etc.
I believe this constitutes a 'fair use' of any such copyrighted material as provided for in section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. No challenge of ownership is intended or implied.
For more information: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/107.
If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond 'fair use', you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.
Copyright notice
All original content in this blog is © Copyright 2013-2017 & an. seqq. by "Liviana" (Giovanna Laine).
